An Eclectic Journal of Opinion, History, Poetry and General Bloviating

Wednesday, September 19, 2012

Garfield Shot But Doctors Killed Him

Wounded Garfield collapses as Robert Todd Lincoln points to the shooter.

On
September 19, 1881 President James A.
Garfield died in agony on the Jersey
Shore 78 days after being shot in the back by a disappointed office seeker
in a Washington train station.He had only been in office a total of 199 days,
almost half that time incapacitated by his injury.

One
of the bullets that fired the morning of July 2 by Charles J. Gateau grazed the President’s arm.The other lodged in his back near the spine.It could not be found.But the search for the bullet, rather than
missile itself ultimately cost Garfield his life.Taken back to the White House several doctors over the next few days probed for the
bullet with instruments, and with their own unwashed hands—a bad practice even
in those days.One doctor even managed
to pierce his liver.The resulting
infection, probably caused by Streptococcus,
resulted in “blood poisoning,”
untreatable in the days before antibiotics.

Still
desperate to find the bullet, inventor Alexander
Graham Bell was called in.He had developed
a magnetic device to locate the projectile.It would have worked, too.But
neither he nor the other doctors realized that the bed on which Garfield was
lying had a metal frame and springs—relatively uncommon at the time—rendering
the magnetic devise useless.Even if the
bullet had been discovered, however, the infection had already taken hold and
it was probably too late to save the President by surgery.

On
September 9, Garfield was taken by train to a beach home in Elberon (now Long Branch) New Jersey
in hopes that the sea air would revive him.It didn’t.

Garfield
was born in Moreland Hills, Ohio on
November 19, 1831.His father died when
he was small and he was raised by his mother.A gifted student, he attended college in nearby Hiram at a school maintained by his family’s Church of Christ (The
Christian Church) denomination before going east to complete his education
at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts from which
he graduated with distinction in 1856.

Returning
to Ohio he took up preaching at the Franklin
Circle Christian Church.He decided
against making a career in the ministry, but was ordained as an elder, making
him the only clergy person ever elected President.He remained a devoted church member the rest
of his life.

Garfield
married in 1858 and began supporting his growing family as a teacher.Meanwhile he privately studied law and
entered politics.He was elected to the OhioState Senate as a Republican
in 1859 and passed the bar the following year.

Garfield’s
rise to prominence began as a youthful officer in the Civil War.He helped raise
the 42nd Ohio Volunteer InfantryRegiment and was named its
Colonel.Major General Don Carlos Buell gave him a command of a mixed
brigade of Ohio and Kentucky
Volunteer infantry and Virginia loyalist
cavalry.He helped clear Confederate forces out of western Kentucky and was promoted to Brigadier.He was a brigade commander at Shiloh
and at the Siege of Corinth,
Mississippi.

Pleading
health concerns Garfield asked for leave from the Army and was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives.He returned to active duty until the new
Congress was sworn in and served as Chief
of Staff for William S. Rosecrans,
Commander of the Army of the Cumberland.After the Battle of Chickamauga he was promoted Major General.In December, 1863 he resigned his commission
to take his seat in Congress.

Garfield
quickly rose to prominence in the House as a hawk on the war and for a harsh Reconstruction policy.He was handily re-elected every two years,
despite having been brushed by the Crédit
Mobilier scandal in which members of Congress were alleged to have taken
bribes to support the Union Pacific
Railroad.

In
1876 he was one of the appointed Republican
Special Commissioners that handed the Presidency
to Republican Rutherford B. Hayes
despite lagging Democrat Samuel Tilden in
the popular vote.The same year he became Republican Floor Leader of the House.

In
January 1880 Garfield was elected to the Senate
by the Ohio Legislature, which had just returned to Republican hands.He went to the Republican National Convention later that year pledged to support
the candidacy of fellow Ohioan John
Sherman.At the convention the leading
candidates, former President Ulysses S
Grant and Maine’s James G. Blaine,
were hopelessly deadlocked after multiple ballots.Grant’s partisans, the so-called Stalwarts represented a return to
business-as-usual and an aggressive use of political patronage.Blaine and Sherman represented, to one degree
or another advocates of Civil Service
Reform and were nick-named the Half
Breeds.On the 36th ballot, Blaine
and Sherman threw their combined support behind a surprised Garfield who won
the nomination.

The
election campaign, against another Civil War General, DemocratWinfield Scott Hancock,
was close fought.In addition the
perennial issues of the pace of Reconstruction and civil service, Chinese immigration was a hot button
issue in California, a crucial swing
state.Both candidates publicly opposed
further Asian immigration.A handwritten
letter purporting to be from Garfield to an H.L. Morey of Massachusetts indicated
he supported unrestricted immigration.The firestorm threatened to effectively derail his campaign until
Garfield proved that the letter was a forgery and that no H. L. Morey
existed.Public sympathy swung to the
wronged Candidate.The popular vote was
tight—Garfield won by only 2,000 votes out of 8.89 million cast—but he handily
won the Electoral College.

Garfield
spent the first months of his term trying to put together a Cabinet in the face of opposition from
Stalwart leader Senator Roscoe Conkling of
New York.Conkling had succeeded in
getting his protégée, former Collector
of the Port of New York Chester Allan Arthur on the ticket as Vice President, but he could not get the
Cabinet posts he desired for his faction, particularly the patronage rich
position of Post Master General.Garfield nominated Blaine as Secretary of State and Robert Todd Lincoln, son of the martyred
President as Secretary of War.He gave the Post Master General job to a New
York state rival of Conkling.Conkling
and the other New York Senator resigned in protest to the affront to Senatorial privilege, but were
surprised when the New York Legislature did not promptly re-elect them.After month of struggle, Garfield had
consolidated his power and defeated the Stalwarts.He finally was ready to turn to his
agenda—the passage of Civil Service Reform and the defense of suffrage for Freedmen in the South.He never got to either task.

On
the morning of September 19 Garfield entered the Sixth Street Station of the
Baltimore and Potomac Railroad for a trip to his alma mater Williams College where he was slated to
make a speech.He was accompanied by
Blaine and Lincoln and two of his young sons.He was shot in the back by Gateau, who had fruitlessly been pursuing an
appointment as a U.S. Consul in Paris, a job for which he was
manifestly unqualified.After he was
subdued by onlookers, Gateau told police that, “I am the Stalwart of
Stalwarts!Now Arthur is President!”

That
led to brief speculation that the horrified Arthur or other Stalwarts were
somehow involved in an assassination plot.Gateau, however, was quickly proven to have acted alone.After the President died, his lawyers tried
to defend him on the charge of murder by saying that the bullets he fired did
not kill the Garfield, his doctors did.Fair enough, but the doctors could have never botched their treatment if
Gateau had not fired.A jury quickly
found him guilty and he was hanged on June 30, 1882.

The
new president surprised everyone, including himself, by successfully pushing
Civil Service reform through congress.He signed the Pendleton Civil
Service Reform Act into lawon
January 16, 1883, a fitting memorial to Garfield.

Robert
Todd Lincoln, who had endured the assassination of his father and was at
Garfield’s side when he was shot, was also in Buffalo, New York at the Pan-American
Exposition at the invitation of the President when William McKinley was shot in 1901.He understandably felt he was something of a jinx and declined all
invitations to appear with other Presidents until the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial in 1922.And that day, he was looking over his
shoulder.